Nurtuing Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert starts out her presentation with a story of how her career took off by writing her book called " Eat, Pray, Love". She talked about how people approached her and said things like, aren't you afraid that you are never going to be able to top that?, and you are doomed that that will be your only successful book, your career will just plateau from now on... ect. The same comments came about her career choice form friends and family, aren't you afraid that you wont be succsessful, and writing is not a job it is a hobby...ect. So the bigger question that came of this was Why? Why are people afraid to fail at something they are great at and make a living off of that is creative and uses natural talent? Her response was that creative people and creative workers have a repuation of being mentally unstable and unpredictable.
Society has this stereotype of creative people like writers, artists, and designers are not smart and the only reason they are doing those jobs is because they didn't do well at school or can't get another job because they, as Gilbert said, are "mentally unstable". Society has not valued the importance of creative minds and how much they contribute to our world. As Dan Pink says throughout his book " A Whole New Mind", right brainers will rule the world. Think of all the products and advertisements and movies that you have seen. Designers and architects and artists have put massive amounts of time designing a product that is appealing to the eye and that might persuaded the buyer to buy. Without designers our world, streets, and homes would not be what they are. It takes innovative people to create something new and beautiful that we would buy.
Elizabeth Gilbert goes on to talk about how creativity is unstable with some people and how it can be protected and looked at as a gift by society instead of something unpredictable in writers and artists. She says that the pressure of being a genius or creatively inclined has killed off many of the artists and the want to be someone who is creative.
Schools I think have a similar mentality that creative minds can't and don't "make it" outside of school and that being an artist is looked at a crazy idea. Schools need to change their mentality and encourage children and teens to express themselves as they want to and to follow their talents and try and fail but get back up and try again. Dan Pink says that not being afraid of failure and being able to come up with new ideas even if they don't work is a very important characteristic of being creative. Never letting the fear of failure get in the way of their ideas.

Contagious: Infecting teens with courage

Contagious...infection...sounds bad but really everything is contagious not just diseases but laughter, confidence, and passion. The speaker, Kiran Bir Sethi tells her story of how one teacher challenged her to challenge everything around her and how contagious this feeling was.
Challenging the system is something I know very well because of the studies that our English class has done. Reading the inspiring stories of people who stood up and challenged the system such as, "1984", "Little Brother", and "Fahrenheit 451". These books and the challenging of my English teacher, pushed me to look at things in a new way. Don't always trust everyone and protect the right that you are given.
"If the boundaries between school and life are blurred then children will go through a journey if aware, seeing the change, enable, where they can be changed, and then empower, to lead the change" Says speaker, Kiran Bir Sethi. This puts into words exactly what teens need to do to challenge themselves and the world around them and also to be consious of what is happening in the world around them.
Tying in my personal experience of challenging myself and others around me, people need to see the difference they can make on the world whether it is feeding under priveliged people of creating a new vaccine to stop the spread of viruses in a third world country, any thing is possible if you combine intrinsic motivation and Sethi's 3 requirements to change and challenge yourself and the world.
Challenging the system is not an easy thing, actually I have never done anything like it. Most of us have grown up in a world where challenging authority was not done period! Today people all over the world such Juliana Rotich, founder of Ushahidi, had challenged the media restriction crisis in Africa by creating fast and easy access information to those who need it most. The program has now been applied to many other parts of the world to inform people of information not provided by restricting governments.
Sethi says that in order for a child to change the world that child needs to experience the situation for his or her self and then change his or her mind set form " teacher told me to I am doing it" which is the "I can" mind set needed to accomplish these goals. Dan Pink might look at this and say it is intrinsic motivation driving these children to do well and try to change something, but I think that it is a combination of intrinsic motivation and how they are teaching the children to be more empathetic towards the world.

Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky presented with much story telling and humor as well to captivate the audience. One example Shirky used in his presentation was Ushahidi, a website that informed readers of the events happening in Africa. It was made by a lawyer women who felt the people of Africa were not receiving enough information because the government is restricting the media. This connects to 1984 and how restricting it was. All the people don't care or try to start a movement until now man stepped out against them. This is just what the woman from Africa is trying to do, appose the government and get information out to people who need it despite the consequences. The restriction of government in Africa proves Cory Doctorow's prediction in Little Brother even though it did not happen in America. The world is starting to form to Cory's and Orwell's predication of how the world might become.
Pink wrote of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations such as the carrot and the stick. Shirky also speaks of intrinsic motivation through the helping of others because of an internal drive to do so. I believe that this plays a huge part for success which agrees with the ideas of Pink as well. Intrinsic motivations could mean the difference between being a couch potato and doing something worth while. Shirky talked about the importance of communal and civic values. I believe that both are important but both connect back with the woman who created Ushahidi, she had the intrinsic motivation to create it but it also had, at first communal value, and then civic value as it expanded to help more and more people.
Combining these two characteristics could help influence and change the world, which is exactly what our generation needs to do to make a difference.

Fishbowl Reflection

On the inner circle, the class made relationships between design and the motivations that compel us to do something. The three motivations are motivation for survival, motivation from reward and punishment (which we have come to the realization that they don't work), and internal motivation, doing something because you want to. We made the relationship that when using the third motivation is when people come up with the original, right brained ideas because they don't feel pressured to be right or wrong as it is with motivation 2. Design is everywhere today because people are not afraid to do something because they want to or to come up with new creative ideas.

Carrots and Sticks

Dan Pink presented his ideas of rewards and punishments, through lawyer like facts and true evidence and thinking processes. He came to the conclusion that neither one works to motivate or improve work quality when used in most cases.
Dan Pink uses many examples and situations presented by other people in history that tested the rewards system. The candle experiment being one of many that were used shows how people look past the bigger picture and small details and they think outside the box. There are even websites that are designed to test your creativity levels such as the candle test.
Multiple studies show that when presented with a reward, people tend to do not as well as when people do a similar task. These are called contingent motivators. If you do... then you get... Businesses have been running their work places like this for years. David Beswick states, "In order for creativity to flourish, people must be allowed to have a degree of freedom to choose their approaches to their work, to fail occasionally without ridicule or punishment, to stretch their horizons in terms of working with others who will share their knowledge, and to feel comfortable knowing that the organization supports their work with the requisite resources. Otherwise, they will keep trying the safe, narrow, repetitive approaches to solving problems." (Beswick). This could be why people do less well when offered a reward because they are afraid that they will fail and not receive the money. But, when there is nothing to lose then people will try different approaches and not be afraid to fail.
Dan Pink also talks about Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives. Companies such as Google are letting there employees work on anything not related to the work and 1/2 of the ideas that are used that year come form the time spent doing "non work related things"in this time period. This technique has been proven to be more productive than others. So the question is, Why are more businesses not using it more to build a bursting economy?
Dan Pink says it throughout his two books and in this video, society needs to make a change for the better and not go off of what doesn't work anymore.

Ben Cameron: The true power of performing arts

Ben Cameron draws his audience in with his humor and knowledge of music artists, authors, and movies. His big picture throughout the talk is that the performing arts such as plays, dance, and music are being over run by technology. Schools are facing a similar problem of business and technology classes taking over the spots of art and music programs all together.
Students, instead of putting their time into music or art, spend more time online or playing video games. On average students entering collage have spent 20,000 hours online and 10,000 hours playing video games. A passage from a book " Good to Great" by Thomas Gladwell stated that its takes about 10,000 or more hours to become a master or professional at something. If this were true, students would be professional video gamers and TV watchers by they time they were 18.
The number of members and audiences are diminishing but the number of artists and musicians are exploding. People want on the other side of the "curtain" or experience. Artistic institutions will continue to have great importance throughout the booming of technology. According to Daniel Pink these right brain acts should be held to higher standards and of greater importance. He says, "The MFA is the new MBA..." (Pink). Pink agrees with Ben Cameron's idea that right brain artistic tasks are still valuable and important as left brain activities.

Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson used multiple methods to get his point across, humor being the most effective and relateable. But one concept that he made that stood out to me was
- "Education runs deep with people like religion and money."
This quote makes me realize that education is so important to people but very few are willing to take that big responsibility of educating the future generation. Yet the people who do become teachers, don't get enough respect for what they do.
Another quote that stood out to me was
-"It's education that is supposed to take us into this future that we can't grasp."
This quote also shows how difficult it is to educate children because we don't know what kind of jobs there will be in 20 years. The whole world dose not know what education can or should prepare us for because we don't know what will change in the future.
This will effect the world because more outsourcing could occur, new more advanced technology could be created and teachers can't prepare students for what they don't know is coming.
This bigger picture throughout the video was that schools squeeze the creativity out of children. Children instead of growing into creativity grow out of it because of schools. This is partly because creative people are OK with being wrong but today the biggest mistake in an educational career is to be wrong. The acceptance of being wrong means that people will come up with original ideas because they are not afraid to be wrong.
Sir Ken Robinson was effective through his humor and connected concepts that were true around the world not just where he lived.
Sir Ken Robinson also makes the point that we start educating children form the waist up until we focus entirely on their brain and then the left side of their brain.
Education needs to incorporate the arts and creativity more in order to prepare for something that might happen in the future.